‘Franklin, go!’ yelled Lloyd, and yanked the Mercedes’ gearshift into drive.
Franklin stared at him as if he didn’t recognize him. ‘I. . . what . . .?’
‘Go, Franklin, go for Christ’s sake!’
Otto snapped, ‘Don’t you dare!’
But at that critical instant, Lloyd had one call on Franklin’s loyalty that Otto couldn’t match. He had given Franklin a name.
‘Go, Franklin, go!’ he shouted at him, almost screaming.
Franklin slammed his foot on to the Mercedes’ gas pedal, and the huge sedan swerved and snaked, its rear tyres blasting out pebbles and dust. Otto made a desperate bid to snatch the keys out of the ignition, but he couldn’t quite reach them. However, he seized hold of the steering-wheel and wouldn’t release his grip, and as the Mercedes roared out of the driveway, and bucked on to the road, he was still clutching it, running at first, then allowing himself to be dragged.
His white face glared into the window of the moving car like a nightmare. They had reached over twenty miles an hour on the curve toward Rancho Santa Fe, and they were still accelerating. ‘Du bist ein Verräter!’ he shrieked at Franklin. ‘Wo ist deine Dankbarkeit?’
Franklin whimpered in terror, but Lloyd continued to shout at him, ‘Keep going! Keep going! He can’t hurt you now!’
‘Verräter!’ cried Otto. ‘Schon bist du Tot!’
Franklin frantically twisted the steering-wheel from side to side, trying to dislodge Otto’s grip, and the car rolled and dipped from one side of the road to the other, its tyres giving out a chorus of continuous howls. But Otto hung on, his shoes dragging and scrabbling on the tarmac, showers of sparks flying from his heels.
They slewed into the brightly lit streets of Rancho Santa Fe, with Otto still holding on.
‘Stop the car, you traitor!’ he panted at Franklin. ‘Stop the car or I’ll kill you now!’
But Kathleen, from the back seat, shouted out, ‘Lloyd! Here!’ and passed over one of the car’s cigarette-lighters. The spiral tip was glowing red-hot.
Without hesitation, Lloyd pressed the cigarette-lighter on to the back of Otto’s hand. There was a sizzle of puckering skin, and Otto let out a deep, outraged roar. Just as they skidded past the entrance to the inn at Rancho Santa Fe, he released his hold on the steering-wheel, and Lloyd twisted around in his seat to see him flying and tumbling across the triangular green, arms and legs, over and over, a malevolent cartwheel, the long-legged scissorman from Struwwelpeter.
‘We did it!’ Franklin whooped. ‘We did it! We did it! Hot dog, hot dog!’
Lloyd kept his eyes on Otto as they sped around the next curve and headed toward the coast. A second before the green disappeared from view, Lloyd saw him climbing on to his feet. With a sense of dread and disappointment, he realized that Otto obviously hadn’t been badly hurt. Kathleen had seen him, too, because she turned to Lloyd and her expression was grim.
‘He’s not going to forgive us for that,’ she said.
‘Hot dog!’ Franklin kept repeating, with that odd deaf-school pronunciation. It came out more like ‘Hudduh, hudduh!’
‘You did good, Franklin,’ Lloyd praised him.
‘The question is, where do we go now?’ Kathleen wanted to know. ‘We may have got away, but Otto’s going to come after us, for sure.’
Lloyd said, ‘I just want to lie low till Wednesday, till they’ve completed their Transformation. Then at least we’ll have a chance of getting Celia and your husband back. I know they’ll have changed. I know we may not even be able to love them any more. Maybe they won’t be able to love us any more. But we have to give them that one chance. They can’t stay as Salamanders. You heard what Otto said, they’re really volatile. They’re as much of a danger to themselves as they are to other people.’
‘Maybe we should drive up the coast, and find ourselves a quiet hotel,’ Kathleen suggested.
‘Well, that sounds romantic, but I’ve got a better idea. Let’s drive out to that Indian place in the Anza Borrego. They had trailers to rent out there, and that’s just about the last place that Otto would think of looking for us. Then as soon as the Transformation’s over, we can take that young Indian boy to the police.’
‘What for?’
‘He’s our only witness that Otto was chanting when the bus was burning, that’s what for. What other witnesses do we have?’
Kathleen shrugged. ‘I guess you’re right.’
Franklin said, ‘I can’t believe it. We did it, we got away!’
‘It’s all thanks to you, buddy,’ Lloyd told him.
‘I never saw Otto so angry,’ Franklin grinned.
‘Oh good, that makes me feel a whole lot better. As if he isn’t frightening enough when he isn’t angry.’
Kathleen said, ‘We could call the police now, you know. They’d find the Salamanders, at least.’
Lloyd shook his head. ‘There’d be a massacre, no doubt about it. And you’d blow any chance of seeing Mike again.’
Kathleen stared at her own reflection in the black-tinted window. ‘I’m not too sure that I want to.’
‘Well,’ said Lloyd. He suddenly realized he was still holding the cigarette-lighter, and he handed it back to Kathleen with a wry grin. ‘It’s a damned hard life, so long as you don’t weaken.’
‘Weaken?’ she said, and he could see in the window that she was crying. ‘No, I’m not going to weaken. I’m just a little tired.’
‘Were things okay between you and Mike?’ Lloyd asked her.
She wiped her eyes with her fingers, ‘Not particularly, even before he went for his medical.’
‘Now you feel guilty because you don’t care for him as much as you think you should?’
She nodded. ‘The trouble is, how can I explain that to Tom? He worshipped Mike, really worshipped him. Half the time I don’t know whether I’m really feeling grief-stricken, or whether I’m acting it for Tom’s sake. That makes me feel so bad.’
Lloyd said, ‘I guess that everybody feels the same way, when they lose somebody close. I remember when my grandfather died. I was really upset, but at the same time I had this peculiar sense of relief that I didn’t have to worry about him any more. I was almost happy for him. We all get born, we all have to die. I guess there really isn’t any reason why we shouldn’t be happy at both events.’
Franklin said, ‘Helmwige will never die.’
‘That’s a creepy thought, isn’t it?’ said Lloyd. ‘That woman’s still going to be forty-something when we’re dead and gone.’
Kathleen asked, ‘Will she really never die? Never, ever? Can’t anybody kill her? What happens if she’s involved in an auto accident, or somebody shoots her, or something like that?’
They were driving down toward Solana Beach, under the interstate. Lloyd said, ‘Take a left here, on to the freeway. I want to take a flying look at my house, before we head out for the desert, and maybe check with Waldo, if I can.’
Franklin swerved on to the entry ramp with squealing tyres. Lloyd glanced behind them. ‘It’s okay, you can slow down now. I don’t want to get pulled over by the cops for a traffic violation, not now.’
‘Sorry,’ said Franklin, although it sounded more like ‘howwy’. But as they joined the almost-deserted I–5, he said, ‘They can be killed by Him.’
‘Who?’ asked Lloyd. ‘Who can be killed by whom?’
‘The ones who live for ever. Helmwige, any of them. They can be killed by Him.’
‘Him? Who’s He, when He’s at home? Did Otto say?’
Franklin shook his head. ‘But I heard him talking to Helmwige one night. That was when Celia first came. He said, “She doesn’t know about Him, does she? Even you can be killed by Him, and so can all of our master race.”’
Lloyd gave Kathleen a quick, excited look. ‘Did Otto come out with any clues about who He might be?’
‘No,’ said Franklin. ‘But the reason I remember what he said was because he kept talking about it, over and over, like he was really worried about it.’
Lloyd sat back. Otto had half suggested that Hitler might have been Transformed, burned and immortalized. Maybe ‘He’ was Hitler. Maybe Der Führer still held absolute sway over all of his followers, just as he had during World War Two.
‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ he asked Kathleen.
‘I don’t know. What are you thinking?’
He explained, but he could see that she found it difficult to believe. ‘I’m sure Hitler’s dead,’ she said. ‘Didn’t they identify his dental records?’
‘It doesn’t matter if they did. His original body’s dead, for certain. Just like Celia was dead and Mike was dead. But what happened to the smoke and the soul that rose right out of that body? It’s hard to believe that Hitler could have seen Helmwige turn into a Salamander, without wanting to try to do the same thing for himself’
‘It doesn’t bear thinking about,’ said Kathleen.
‘No, it doesn’t. But it could be true.’
It was still two hours before dawn when Franklin drove the Mercedes quietly through North Torrey, so that Lloyd could inspect his house. Lloyd climbed out of the car and walked up the sloping driveway, then circled the house to the back. The kitchen doors and windows had been boarded up, and plastic sheeting had been draped over the kitchen roof. There was a strong noxious reek of smoke, and when he peered in through one of the side windows, Lloyd could tell that, apart from rebuilding the kitchen, he was going to have to redecorate almost the entire house. Still, having once been an insurance salesman, he had made sure that his fire policy was comprehensive and up-to-date. For the money he was going to get, he could afford almost to tear down this house and build another one, from scratch. In a way, he found that a very tempting thought. This house reminded him so strongly of Celia, and the life they had been planning to live together. They had even thought of filling in the grave-like conversation-pit, in case baby fell into it.
Lloyd rattled the front door to make sure it was locked. The house seemed to be reasonably secure, and around here the neighbours were too nosey to make burglary much of a practical proposition. Jesus, the Kazowskis even noticed when he put out the trash in new pyjamas. ‘Noticed your new pyjamas, Lloyd. The Ascot shop?’
Lloyd left the house and walked back to the car. Kathleen said, ‘Is there any place we can get some coffee and something to eat? I think I’m just about to pass out. I keep tasting Helmwige’s sauerkraut.’
‘Sure, we can go to the restaurant,’ said Lloyd. ‘I can ask Waldo to meet us there.’
The sky was beginning to lighten as they drove toward La Jolla. Lloyd was feeling tired, but strangely changed. Stronger, somehow, as if he had at last accepted the burning of his house and the burning of the woman he loved, and was preparing to face what a new day was going to bring him. He looked around at Kathleen and she managed to summon a smile.
Waldo was delighted to see him, but horrified by his appearance.
‘You look like you won first prize in a Mickey Rourke look-alike contest,’ he said, bringing over a large white jug of espresso coffee and a stack of steaming baguettes. ‘Why don’t I call Louis, and have him come over and cook you a proper breakfast?’
‘We don’t have time for that,’ Lloyd told him. ‘Listen—we have to keep our heads down for a few days. We won’t be too far away, but I’m not going to tell you where we’re going to go, in case you get asked by somebody who won’t take no for an answer.’
‘Mr Denman, my lips are sealed,’ Waldo assured him.
‘How’s business?’ Lloyd asked him. He looked around at the restaurant, at the neatly laid tables, the neatly folded napkins and the shining wine-glasses, and for some reason he didn’t find it enchanting any more. Instead, it looked prissy and claustrophobic, the kind of place where people were more concerned about foie gras chaud poêlé aux blancs de poireaux than they were about life, and the struggle that most of the world went through daily, simply to stay free.
Waldo offered Franklin some more baguettes. ‘Business is fine. Do you want to see the books? Maybe levelling out a little, but nothing to worry about. People will always demand good fish, cooked good. Do you know what I read yesterday? The reason human beings got such big brains, they always ate fish. People who don’t eat fish, they’re going backward, like evolution in reverse. You don’t eat fish, you’re going to wind up like Barney Rubble.’
Kathleen gave a tired smile. ‘You’ve got yourself a wonderful maitre d’ here, Lloyd. I never knew any restaurauteur who worried about Darwin as well as Paul Bocuse.’
‘Where’d you read that stuff, Waldo?’ Lloyd demanded.
‘It’s true,’ Waldo insisted. ‘Same with birds. They used to be land creatures, but then they started eating shellfish that didn’t contain hardly no calcium. Their bones got lighter and lighter, and in the end they literally blew away into the air.’
‘This is true?’ asked Franklin, fascinated. Waldo glanced at Lloyd, alarmed by Franklin’s loudness. ‘Hithith hroo?’ Franklin had demanded, as far as Waldo could tell.
They talked for almost an hour. Outside, the sun had risen, and La Jolla cove shone golden and pale in the early-morning fog. Lloyd went to the men’s room for a wash and a shave, while Kathleen called Lucy and asked after Tom, and Franklin unashamedly devoured more baguettes.
‘Your friend has an appetite,’ smiled Waldo, taking hold of Lloyd’s hand.
Lloyd smiled, and nodded.
‘Listen,’ said Waldo, ‘I don’t know what you’ve got yourself into here. Maybe you want me to call the cops about it?’
‘Not yet,’ Lloyd told him. ‘I have to get my revenge first.’
‘Revenge?’ sniffed Waldo. ‘I don’t know. I used to think about revenge. I used to think about going back to Europe, and looking for the people who killed my family. I could have been like those Nazi-hunters, you know? I could have brought them all to trial. But what’s it worth, in the end, this wonderful revenge? It doesn’t achieve nothing. It doesn’t make you feel any better. It ends up making you worse than the people you’re trying to punish.’
‘Maybe,’ said Lloyd, and gave Waldo’s hand a last affectionate squeeze. This little fat guy, who took so much pride in his work, and had so much to give to the world that the world probably didn’t have room for it all. ‘Sometimes you have to think of the future, as well as the past.’
They left La Jolla a few minutes before nine o’clock, and headed eastward, with the sun in front of them. This time, Lloyd did the driving, wearing Otto’s tiny green-lensed sunglasses, which he had discovered in the Mercedes’ glove compartment. Kathleen said, ‘God, you look like Himmler.’ Franklin had made himself comfortable in the back seat, and by the time they started climbing toward Santa Ysabel, he was already snoring.
‘You want me to talk to you?’ asked Kathleen, suppressing a yawn.
‘Not if you want to sleep.’
‘I’ll just close my eyes for a moment, okay?’
And that’s how it was that Lloyd sped across the scrubby outskirts of the Anza Borrego State Park in a stolen Mercedes sedan with Kathleen lolling in the front seat, her forehead knocking softly against the passenger window with every bump in the road, and Franklin stretched out on the back seat, snoring in two distinct keys. Lloyd wryly wished that Celia were with them: she could have identified the exact key in which Franklin was snoring, and maybe sung along to it, too.
Celia had been brilliant, bright, and always funny. Lloyd tuned the Mercedes radio to KFSD on 94.1, and caught Bruch’s Kol Nidrei, played by Vladimir Ashkenazy. It was uncanny: the Kol Nidrei had always been one of Celia’s favourites, and Lloyd felt almost as if Celia were trying to get in touch with him.
Ahead of him, the desert burned bright, a land of hills and mirrors. Behind him, the dust blew high. But Lloyd felt neither lonely nor sad, nor particularly grief-stricken, not now. He had a job to do which nobody else in the world could do, and for which (in all probability) nobody would thank him. He hummed along with Bruch, and watched the miles ticking steadily upward on the Mercedes’ clock.
By early lunchtime, they drove past the place where the bus had burned. The wreck had been towed away now, and there was no reminder of what had happened except for a cross that somebody had fashioned out of two charred aluminium roof-supports, a cross that was hung with dried-out wreaths and withered flowers. Kathleen was still asleep as they drove by, and Lloyd didn’t wake her. Some places are worth remembering, other places are best forgotten.
But Kathleen woke as they drew up outside Tony Express’s store, and stared at Lloyd for a moment as if she couldn’t think who he was.
‘You know, I was having the weirdest dream? I dreamed I was swimming off Baja with Mike. The ocean kept rocking me up and down. I guess it must have been the car.’ But then she frowned, and said, ‘Mike looked so strange, in this dream. He looked like he didn’t have any eyes.’
‘Come on,’ said Lloyd, and opened the car door. ‘Let’s go see what accommodation we can find for ourselves.’
He found Tony Express sitting inside the shadowy darkness of the store, threading beads. Considering he was blind, Tony Express was working with extraordinary speed, his fingers sorting out beads of different colour and texture, and swiftly impaling them on his threading-needle, almost as if he were an insect-collector. Or an eater of flies, thought Lloyd, obliquely, and it was a thought which seemed to take a long time to go away, like a train disappearing across the flattest of horizons.
‘Tony? How’re you doing?’ he asked.
The blind Indian boy kept on picking out beads, picking out beads. ‘Doing fine, thanks. Doing what Red Indians are best at. Walla-walla-walla, heap good necklace, all that stuff.’
‘Looks good to me,’ said Lloyd.
‘Ho-ho.’ Tony Express retaliated. ‘A heap of shit would look good to you, if I painted it red, white and blue.’
‘Do you remember me?’ Lloyd asked him. Because—God almighty—if he couldn’t remember Lloyd’s voice—then how could he clearly remember the voice of the man who had called out ‘Junius! Junius!’ to a busload of burning disciples?
‘Sure I know you, man,’ said Tony Express. ‘What you come back here for? I told you everything, there’s nothing else.’ I’ll tell you everything I can, there’s little to relate.
‘I was wondering if we could maybe hang out here for a while.’
‘You’re wearing Hugo Boss aftershave and you want to hang out here?’
‘I’m looking for a little peace, that’s all. A few days’ break from the hurly-burly of yuppiedom.’
‘You’re not hiding from the law?’
‘Of course not.’
Tony Express suddenly lifted his head. ‘Who’s the big guy, man? He wasn’t with you before.’
Lloyd was taken aback, and turned around to Franklin and shrugged. Maybe Tony Express was only kidding that he was blind.
But Tony Express immediately said, ‘It’s a knack, man. I can only do it in the afternoons, when the sun’s shining into the store. I can feel him blot out the warmth.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Franklin, stepping out of the sunshine.
‘Don’t worry about it, man,’ said Tony Express. He deftly knotted the necklace he was stringing, and closed the lid on the cigar-box full of beads. ‘There’s an empty trailer next to ours. It belongs to an Indian called Zuni Tone. He’s no damn Zuni and he sure doesn’t have no tone, but there you go. You can rent it for twenty a week.’
He led them around the back of the store, where instantly two brindled mongrels launched themselves furiously from their makeshift packing-case kennel, their eyes bulging, until they were brought to a throttling halt by the chains around their throats. ‘Don’t mind them,’ said Tony Express. ‘They only eat lawmen and truancy officers. They’ve got the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.’
Kathleen held Lloyd’s arm as they skirted around the growling, slavering dogs. ‘That’s one guarantee that I wouldn’t like to put to the test,’ she told Tony Express.
Tony Express opened the high wire gate to the compound, waited patiently while they filed in, and led them between the trailers with the nonchalance of somebody who knows exactly where he wants to go. He dodged potholes, washing-lines, upturned Coca-Cola crates. He acknowledged old men sitting on dilapidated armchairs under tattered awnings, he called to women and children, and even said, ‘Hi, Geronimo!’ to a cat that was sleeping in the middle of a worn-down tyre.
‘It’s hard for me to believe that this boy is blind,’ Franklin remarked.
‘In his way, he can see more than we can,’ Lloyd replied. ‘He’s a damned sight more intelligent, too.’
Tony Express didn’t say anything, didn’t turn around, but he lifted one finger in the air to show Lloyd that he had heard.
At last they reached a large, sagging, green-painted trailer with overgrown window-boxes and a Charley Noble stovepipe sticking out of the black-tarred roof. Tony Express opened the front door for them and let them take a look inside.
The trailer was gloomy and fiercely hot, but almost the first thing they bumped into was a huge Westinghouse air-conditioner which looked as if it had previously been used to cool the Superbowl. The rest of the interior was surprisingly clean and tidy. There was a table, set with a vase of dried flowers, a dresser with willow-pattern plates arranged along it, an old-fashioned but scrupulously neat kitchenette, and a tiny bathroom with a mahogany-veneered Civil War washstand and a bean-shaped re-enamelled bath.
Lloyd went to one of the bookshelves and picked out a paperback at random. ‘The poems of Sterling Brown?’ he queried.
Tony Express laughed and quoted.
O Ma Rainey
Li’l and low,
Sing us ‘bout de hard luck
Roun’ our do’;
Sing us ‘bout de lonesome road
We mus’ go
He added, with a smile, ‘Zuni Tone is heavily into the emancipation of oppressed people, man.’
‘Yes, well, I think we are too,’ Lloyd replied.
Tony Express circled around and around in the middle of the floor, as if he were looking at everything. Maybe he was picking up vibrations, maybe he was picking up smells, or noises, all of those nuances which sighted people are usually too insensitive to notice.
‘You like it, man? What do you think?’
‘It’s better than I could have expected. Cleaner, for sure.’
Tony Express stopped circling. ‘You think that Indians are dirty or something?’
Lloyd felt uncomfortable. ‘No, no. Of course not. What I meant was . . .’
Tony Express flapped his hand at him as if to tell him to forget it. ‘The twenty up front, man. In folding. Our credit-machine’s broke.’
Lloyd produced a twenty, and pressed it into Tony Express’s hand. ‘It’s yours,’ said Tony Express. ‘Power extra, depending on what you use. There should be clean linen in the closet, Zuni Tone’s very particular. Like he always sweeps up the rug after he’s been clipping his toenails.’
‘Glad to know it,’ said Lloyd.
Tony Express was about to leave the mobile home when they heard a car horn honking, out by the front of the store. ‘Wait up,’ he said, and swung himself down the steps, and jogged off between the mobile homes. Lloyd went through to the kitchenette and tested the gas and the water. The gas was working and after a brief, asthmatic pause, the water came coughing out of the tap.
Kathleen sat down on the bed. ‘You know, you always picture these trailer-parks as being so slummy. But look how neat everything is. I guess it’s the discipline of living in such a small space.’
They were still talking when Franklin lifted the net curtain and peered out. ‘The boy’s coming back,’ he said. ‘He’s got two policemen with him.’
‘Oh, what?’ Lloyd demanded. He lifted the other side of the curtain and saw that Franklin was right. Tony Express was weaving his way back between the trailers closely followed by a fat ruddy-complexioned highway patrolman, and a thinner, darker officer in designer sunglasses and a sharply pressed shirt.
‘What are we going to do?’ Kathleen asked, as Lloyd let the curtain fall back.
‘Nothing we can do,’ Lloyd told her. ‘Tough it out, is all.’
They stood waiting in silence while Tony Express and the two highway patrolmen approached the trailer. The door opened, and the entire trailer groaned and dipped to one side as Sergeant Jim Griglak climbed aboard, closely followed by Ric Munoz. Jim Griglak shuffled his way toward the living-area, holding his wide-brimmed hat pressed against his chest, as if he were paying a respectful visit to some friends of the family. Ric Munoz was relentlessly chewing Orbit, and he left his sunglasses on.
‘Sergeant Jim Griglak, Highway Patrol,’ said Jim Griglak, although Lloyd could read that for himself. ‘We’ve been asked to stop a Mercedes-Benz sedan answering the description of the vehicle parked by the roadway back there, and detain the occupants. Are you the occupants?’
Lloyd shook his head. ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about, Sergeant. I never owned a Mercedes-Benz in my life. Beverly Hills Skodas. I’m a BMW man, myself.’
Jim Griglak breathed patiently. ‘We’re not talking ownership, here, sir. We’re talking grand theft auto.’
‘Still don’t know what you’re talking about. If I don’t like Mercedes-Benzes, why should I steal one?’
Ric Munoz put in, ‘Sometimes any vee-hickle is better than no vee-hickle.’
Jim Griglak looked around the three of them. ‘Do you want to tell me your names, and what you’re doing here?’
Lloyd said, ‘We’re an ethnic study group from UC San Diego. I’m Professor Holden Caulfield, these are my assistants. We’re putting together a social profile of small disaffected Indian communities, such as this trailer park.’
Jim Griglak closed his eyes for a moment as if summoning huge internal reserves of patience. At last he said, ‘I’m arresting all three of you on suspicion of grand theft auto. I’ve read The Catcher in the Rye, too, Professor Caulfield. Pity you couldn’t have thought of some much more convincing alias, like Bruce Wayne.’
He sniffed, and recited their rights. Then he said, ‘Let’s go. You’re going to make me late for my lunch.’
Ric Munoz added, ‘Sergeant Griglak get seriously pissed if he’s late for his lunch.’
There was nothing they could do. Led by Tony Express, they filed out of the trailer and back through the gate toward the store, where the dogs snarled and yapped and hurled themselves wildly against their chains.
‘Thanks a lot, pal,’ Lloyd told Tony Express, as they walked around the side of the store. ‘Remind me to do you a favour some day.’
‘I couldn’t help it, man,’ Tony Express replied. ‘They’d already seen the car, they knew you had to be around someplace.’
Lloyd said, ‘That guy we’re trying to catch . . . the one who said “Junius! Junius!” when the bus was burning . . . I want you to know that he’s just about the most disgusting slime on two legs. So if we do manage to get this sorted, and we do manage to catch him, I hope you’re going to be ready to come forward and identify his voice.’
‘What if I don’t?’
‘Then he and his friends are going to do to today’s Americans what yesterday’s Americans did to the Indians. Capiche? He and his friends think they’re some kind of master race, do you understand what I mean? They think the world belongs to them, and they’re the people to rule it. You ever heard of Adolf Hitler?’
‘Sure I heard of Adolf Hitler. I told you I was over-educated for a kid of my age.’
‘Well, what this Junius guy is trying to do is carry on where Adolf Hitler left off.’
‘Here? In California?’
‘Why not? It’s one of the richest and most influential places in the world. What California does today, the rest of the world is going to be doing tomorrow.’
‘Give your mouth a rest, will you?’ Jim Griglak called out. ‘You elected to remain silent, so frigging well remain silent.’
Tony Express looked pale and his breathing was oddly shallow. ‘I couldn’t help it, man. They’d already seen the car.’
They reached the road. It was grillingly hot, and heat rose from the blacktop like the shallows of a wind-ruffled lake. Jim Griglak opened the rear door of his Highway Patrol car and indicated with a curt nod of his head that Franklin should climb in. Franklin hesitated, and looked dubious.
‘Come on, bonehead, we’re going for the scenic tour,’ Jim Griglak rasped.
They climbed into the back of the patrol car and Jim Griglak locked the doors. Then they U-turned and headed back toward the main highway, while Tony Express stood forlornly by the side of the road listening to them go.
Ric Munoz picked up the intercom and reported back to headquarters that they were bringing in three suspects for the theft of Otto Mander’s Mercedes. Jim Griglak sang to himself under his breath as he drove, and occasionally made comments about the passing scenery, or if there was life after retirement, or baseball. He went with tedious detail into an explanation of the Boudreau Shift, which is when a manager counters a slugger who always pulls to the right by shifting all of his fielders to the right of second.
Lloyd and Kathleen and Franklin said nothing. Franklin was bemused. Lloyd and Kathleen were both physically and emotionally exhausted. The jiggling of the car began to send them to sleep.
‘I have often walked . . . down this tooty-wooty before . . .’ sang Jim Griglak. ‘And the pavements tooty-wooty frooty-woot before . . . Hey, did I ever tell you that story about Yogi Berra, when they gave him a cheque that said, “Pay to Bearer”?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Ric replied, manfully. He was beginning to look forward to Jim Griglak’s retirement.
Jim Griglak chuckled. ‘He said, “Hey, they spelled my name wrong!”’
They had travelled nearly six miles across the dazzling desert landscape before Jim Griglak suddenly began to slow down. The change in speed woke Lloyd almost immediately, and he sat up abruptly and said, ‘What is it? What’s happening?’
But Jim Griglak didn’t answer. Instead he drove slower and slower, peering ahead of him as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
Kathleen grasped Lloyd’s arm and said, ‘Lloyd, look!’
Lloyd shifted his position and frowned ahead into the sunlight. What he saw gave him a feeling of delight and terror, both at once, as if he had woken up one morning and found that he could fly.
‘This can’t be so,’ whispered Jim Griglak.
‘It’s so all right,’ said Ric Munoz, echoing the moment that they had found that burned bus, and all of its charred and grisly occupants.
Standing beside the road not a hundred feet ahead of them were two figures. One was an elderly Indian, in jeans and red plaid shirt. The other was the skinny, wind-tattered figure of Tony Express. In his hand he was holding the long stick decorated with strips of skin and fur, squirrel-tails and beads, the sundance doll that he had shown them back at the store, the first time they had met him.
The sun lanced off the lenses of his sunglasses. He wasn’t afraid. He was simply waiting. Jim Griglak slowed the patrol car to a whining crawl, and at last to a halt, still thirty feet shy of the skinny Pechanga blind boy with the ragged stick.
He applied the parking-brake with a heave of his foot, and then switched off the engine. It was hot and bright and suddenly silent.
‘What’s wrong?’ Lloyd asked him, at last.
Jim Griglak shifted himself around in the driver’s seat and stared at Lloyd balefully. ‘You’re looking at a young blind Indian kid who has just managed to overtake a car travelling at fifty-five miles an hour, on foot, across a desert landscape heated well in excess of one hundred and ten degrees fahrenheit. And you’re asking me what’s wrong?’
‘Maybe he has a brother,’ Kathleen suggested, without much hope. ‘Maybe he telephoned him, and arranged for him to meet up with us here—you know, pretending to be him.’
Jim Griglak slowly and flatly shook his head. ‘That is the same kid. That is the exact same kid who stood outside his dad’s store less than fifteen minutes ago and watched us drive away.’
Ric Munoz gave an unbalanced laugh. ‘Come on, Sergeant, what are we saying here? We know there’s only one kid. Anyway—who’s the old guy with him? You’re making a mistake, you must be. All ethnic minorities look the same.’
‘You’re an ethnic minority,’ Jim Griglak reminded him.
‘Oh, sure, but some of us transcend our origins, right?’
‘You think a frigging Toyota Turbo and a frigging pair of designer sunglasses changes what you are? That’s the same frigging kid, Munoz, on my mother’s grave.’
Jim Griglak turned back to Lloyd and Kathleen and Franklin and said, ‘Stay put, you got it. Watch my lips. S-t-a-y p-u-t.’
He heaved himself out of the car. Ric Munoz hesitated for a moment, then unclipped the pump-gun from its rack in front of the dashboard, and followed him, keeping the gun held high. Lloyd watched them walk slowly toward the two Indians, the old Indian in the baggy jeans and the young blind Indian in the headband, and for a moment he found himself unable to speak. It was like watching history.
Kathleen whispered, ‘Is that really him? It looks like him!’
‘It can’t be him,’ Lloyd told her. ‘How could anybody run six miles in less than ten minutes, and arrive here well ahead of us? He may be precocious, and he may be just a little crazy, but he’s human.’
‘So you think that’s his double?’
‘It makes a damned sight more sense than it being him!’
‘But supposing . . .’
‘Supposing what?’
‘I don’t know,’ Kathleen replied, flustered. ‘It just seems to me that if Otto is capable of burning people and bringing them back to life again, maybe there’s more to this world than we usually allow ourselves to see.’